by Sarah Terry, Senior Director of Product Management & Beth Winters, Senior Product Marketing Manager
At LogicMonitor, we are deeply committed to a mission that goes beyond the conventional: revolutionizing IT monitoring through hybrid observability powered by AI. This ambition is not merely a slogan but the cornerstone of our entire approach. Our LM Envision platform was purposely designed to bring together diverse IT environments under one seamless, integrated experience.
Enterprises have complex IT ecosystems. By delivering comprehensive visibility into your IT infrastructure—whether it’s on-premise, hybrid, or cloud-based— we help organizations streamline operations, minimize expenses, and grow with confidence.
LogicMonitor’s hybrid observability approach empowers IT and CloudOps teams through relentless focus on our three pillars of innovation:
- Layered Intelligence in every aspect of our platform
- Delivering a Unified Experience
- Extensive Hybrid Coverage
Our latest features support these pillars by helping organizations deliver high service availability, reduce the time required to solve problems, and identify root causes faster.
Interested in learning more? Join us for the accompanying Winter Release webinar, titled “Unleashing Hybrid Observability: LogicMonitor’s Latest Product Innovations.” This will take place on Tuesday, February 27th at 11 am PST, where our product team will demo the new capabilities described below!
Modern IT Operations Observability Challenges
In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, modern IT teams face a multifaceted set of challenges that test their agility, efficiency, and innovation. These challenges, while distinct, are deeply interconnected, impacting the ability of organizations to maintain a competitive edge and operational excellence. Here, we delve into the core issues confronting today’s IT operations teams and explore strategic approaches to overcome them.
High Complexity
- Modern IT environments blend legacy systems, cloud platforms, and new technologies, creating significant complexity. This mix, alongside rapid application and infrastructure growth, challenges visibility and control.
- A widening skills gap, due to rapid tech advancement exceeding the supply of skilled professionals, further complicates efficient IT ecosystem management.
Addressing these issues requires robust observability solutions and a strategic focus on workforce development.
Efficient Operations
- The spread of IT assets across various domains leads to governance, cost, and focus challenges, a situation worsened by a traditional, reactive approach to incident management.
- IT teams under pressure to achieve more with less need solutions that automate tasks, optimize resource management, and improve incident response times.
Adopting such technologies allows a shift from reactive to strategic operations, boosting service levels and operational flexibility.
Speed of Innovation
- Aligning IT more closely with business goals is crucial for fostering service agility and innovation.
- Challenges like cloud migration and overcoming the perception of IT as an innovation barrier necessitate reevaluating IT’s organizational role.
- Embracing agile methodologies, continuous delivery, and a culture of experimentation and quick iteration are key.
By positioning IT as a strategic business asset, organizations can create an environment that supports and drives growth and transformation.
Why LM Envision
Our LM Envision platform integrates AI-driven insights, automation, and cloud-native capabilities to streamline and simplify IT operations. This enables IT businesses to effectively tame complexity, boost operational efficiency, and foster innovation at an accelerated pace.
We want to transform IT teams from a support role into a key driver of business success. This will empower them to not only anticipate and respond to current demands but also to shape future technological landscapes.
What’s New in Layered Intelligence
LM Co-Pilot (Preview)
LogicMonitor’s new Generative AI tool, LM Co-Pilot, revolutionizes account setup and day-to-day administration. With its interactive dialogue and real-time assistance, it accelerates processes, reduces errors, and enhances the user experience. By simplifying manual multi-step workflows and multi-page administrative tasks (like adding devices or new users) into a curated, chat-like experience, LM Co-Pilot frees up IT teams to work on more engaging tasks.
Currently, LM Co-Pilot is only available in preview mode. If you want to participate in our Controlled Availability program, please contact your LogicMonitor account representative.
Stay tuned in the coming months as we roll out new LM Co-Pilot capabilities, including Support, which will leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) to summarize documentation and answer queries about LM Envision features, and Troubleshooting, which will automate workflows for rapid troubleshooting and resolution of complex hybrid infrastructure issues.
Log Analysis (Preview)
When troubleshooting business-impacting events in a hybrid environment, users typically need complex queries to scan logs across the different services, applications, and resource types (e.g., network devices, load balancers, databases, and cloud resources). This time-consuming process usually requires deep domain knowledge.
Log Analysis simplifies troubleshooting by quickly surfacing contextually relevant logs through advanced ML techniques and visual filtering. Log Analysis automatically analyzes and categorizes log messages, providing sentiment scores based on log level, keywords, negative phrases, and custom dimensions. This helps users quickly detect the severity of log messages and prioritize the key phrases that apply to their most pressing issues.
Now, time-consuming work such as determining severity and finding relevant logs is handled by LogicMonitor’s AI, which enables operations and support teams to be more effective when solving problems.
Edwin AI
Edwin AI puts AI to work and supercharges IT productivity by automating alert correlation, contextualization, prioritization, and incident management, all personalized to a business’s unique needs. Edwin AI extracts the richest, most relevant context from LogicMonitor and ServiceNow CMDB for a highly accurate and customizable correlation.
Let’s say a core switch link has gone down due to a config issue in your campus, generating an alert storm with hundreds of access points and switches being impacted. Edwin AI will combine the context of devices as switches, APs, and campus location from LogicMonitor to help correlate this storm of alerts into a single actionable insight. Edwin AI automatically summarizes all the underlying events for the level one NoC engineers in the ServiceNow ticket.
By combining natural language processing and unsupervised machine learning, Edwin AI cuts through the noise to elevate the most important issues. As a result, IT and CloudOps teams can diagnose problems faster, reduce MTTR, increase efficiency, and prevent problems from exploding into costly downtime and business-critical incidents. Dexda acts as a single source of truth across your entire environment, optimizing incident response and accelerating MTTR.
Unlike other solutions, Edwin AI uses open and customizable Machine Learning models, offering personalized IT at scale. Essentially, it’s like having an extra ITOps engineer on your team!
Ready to gain better context into issues you’re already collecting with LogicMonitor’s personalized approach to AIOps? Reach out to your LogicMonitor account representative, or email us at [email protected] to get started with Edwin AI today!
What’s new in Unified Experience
New User Interface (GA)
Introduced over the summer, our new user interface (now GA) has a more modern look and feel. It demonstrates LogicMonitor’s mission of creating an industry-leading Unified Experience across all IT environments: hybrid, cloud, and on-prem.
This quarter, we’ve added a new log dashboard widget that displays logs for a single resource or group of resources. Thus making it easier than ever to share aggregated log information with stakeholders for faster troubleshooting.
LM Envision’s latest features, like the log dashboard widget, are being added exclusively to the new user interface. Simply toggle on the “New UI Preview” button to take advantage of the log dashboard widget and other new features such as:
Click here for more information on the new UI or visit the documentation.
Resource Explorer (GA)
As highlighted in the fall release blog, LM Envision’s new Resource Explorer (now in GA) helps operations teams quickly organize and visualize their entire hybrid multi-cloud environment in just a few clicks.
Resource Explorer surfaces key insights into business performance by clearly displaying overall resource and application health. Teams can easily isolate high priority issues for faster speed of execution and greater agility with comprehensive visibility across thousands of resources in a single, organized view. Easily filter and group views based on tags such as location, cloud provider, alerts, and more to spot problems, reduce unplanned downtime, and maintain your service levels.
As a reminder, you must toggle on the new UI to take advantage of Resource Explorer. For more information, watch the demo or check out the documentation!
Organize on-premises and multi-cloud resources in a single view.
Drill down into a resource at a known location to isolate an issue.
What’s new in Hybrid Coverage
Cloud-Managed Networking
There are many areas in which IT teams are modernizing their network services and infrastructure, including SD-WAN, Cameras, Environmental Sensors, and Wireless Access Points. Whether augmenting or pivoting from MPLS/VPN connectivity services to SDN or embracing cloud-managed networking, LogicMonitor continues to expand its breadth of coverage and deliver on our promise of unified hybrid observability.
Several previously previewed capabilities are now Generally Available, including support for:
- VMware SD-WAN (formerly VeloCloud)
- Cisco Catalyst Center-managed Wireless Access Points
- Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Points
- Cisco Meraki Environmental Sensors
Our integration with Cisco Catalyst Center (previously Cisco DNA Center) is of particular note.
For more information, check out these additional resources:
Forward Together
Our journey is far from over. As we continue to innovate, our focus remains on empowering our customers with the solutions and insights needed to achieve operational excellence. Hybrid Observability powered by AI isn’t just what we do—it’s who we are. We’re excited about the future and invite you to join us on this transformative journey.
In our pursuit, we’re not just aiming to lead; we’re striving to change the game. By continuously evolving and adapting, we’re not only meeting the needs of today’s digital world but also shaping the future of IT monitoring.
Welcome to the next chapter in IT innovation. Welcome to LogicMonitor’s vision of Hybrid Observability powered by AI. To learn more about our latest innovations, make sure to join our upcoming webinar, “Unleashing Hybrid Observability: LogicMonitor’s Latest Product Innovations”
Legacy systems can cost millions
Did you know that nearly 15% of IT budgets go towards maintaining legacy systems? Recent data suggests that these systems cost hundreds of millions annually to operate and maintain. For that reason, many companies continue to invest in moving their systems away from expensive on-premises to the cloud, where maintenance is more cost-effective and consistent thanks to modern monitoring capabilities.
To make an informed decision about modernizing your legacy applications, it’s important to consider the problem you’re trying to attack. Consider some of the implications of using legacy systems when everything is moving at the speed of the cloud:
- It’s expensive to host on-prem
- On-premises alone isn’t scalable or cost efficient
- They’re expensive to maintain due to out-of-date technology
- Legacy tools require more skills and consistent hygiene to use and maintain efficiently
Which companies should modernize their infrastructure?
Modernization does not just apply to massive companies. From the U.S. military to start-ups, modernization is the key to process improvement. With advances in machine learning and AI, data-driven systems are speeding up processes everywhere and in every field. Often, legacy systems require IT skills that many IT techs don’t have, which become expensive to track down. Legacy tools also limit extensibility, lack diverse ecosystem integrations, and hinder growth due to lack of visibility from multiple point products.
Leaders must find effective ways to modernize their legacy systems, which can lead to more innovation, efficient processes, and better business outcomes. Modernization can remove obstacles that prevent growth, and it can even mean keeping the company safe. Many IT leaders are concerned with scaling and security, which legacy systems can stifle.
Evaluate with intention
Consider technology, architecture, and functionality: these are anchored within the heart of the business, whether fit, valuable, or agile. If your legacy systems aren’t communicating with business needs – future or current – they can become a liability.
What are your specific business goals? Identify how modernization impacts revenue, market share, and customer experience. Where is the current system underperforming? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Knowing the answers to these questions are crucial when creating your ideal roadmap for modernization, and it can help you prioritize changes and integrations.
Furthermore, consider whether your legacy systems cost too much to operate. As competitors continue to modernize, they can significantly speed up their processes, scale effortlessly, and do all of this in a safe and secure environment. If this becomes a concern, it’s likely time to modernize.
Consider the future
Once you’ve looked into what needs to be upgraded, there’s a basic scale that is similar to a risk-reward scenario. This can be applied as you figure out what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t work.
Consider these steps when it comes to evaluating a legacy system:
- Dive in: Check out application features by summarizing data and functions, making them available as services via API.
- Rehost: Redeploy the application to the infrastructure (physical, virtual, or cloud) without modifying code, features, or function.
- Migrate: Move to a new platform, making minimal code changes, but not to the structure, features, or function.
- Reshape: Optimize existing code to remove technical debt and improve anything that exists without purpose.
- Rebuild: Shift the code to new application architecture and check if there are better capabilities. Redesign the application while maintaining scope.
- Replace: Eliminate and replace the former application, considering new requirements and needs.
Why should we care about legacy system modernization moving forward?
If a system is old, the skills required to maintain it become outdated. This makes it difficult to find, train, or retrain talent. Legacy systems are usually on-prem, which is also more costly to maintain. The typically large codebase comes with additional complexities that can require further time and resources to keep running.
Moving to the cloud has many benefits, including faster delivery time, a reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO), and increased opportunity for innovation. Agility and flexibility become critical as the world goes completely digital. By moving to the cloud, companies reduce resource demand without sacrificing customer expectations and experience. Not to mention, the cost savings can contribute to business growth and a better bottom line.
Many times, legacy software can’t adapt to modern business requirements, which means losing business to competitors who have modernized. If a system is old, there can also be compliance implications, like maintaining regulatory standards such as CCPA, GLBA, and HIPAA.
Whether you’re concerned about customer experience and cybersecurity – or you have apprehensions about the cloud – it’s clear that operating and maintaining legacy systems is costly. As businesses continue to scale digitally, modernizing your monitoring capabilities is essential. Moving to the cloud is not only cost-friendly, but it will help you stay ahead of the competition. If you’re thinking about making changes to your monitoring systems, check out this eBook: How to Modernize Your Approach to Infrastructure Monitoring.